The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Examples of Link Building

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Examples of Link Building

For people who work in SEO service world, it is important to make smart link building decisions. One of the ways is by knowing the difference between the good, the bad, and the ugly examples of link building. Only by identifying what is good and what is bad, you can prevent yourself from making such a mistake. In fact, by knowing the difference, we can create a strategy rather than just building links. Here are the three types of links that you need to know.

The Good Links
What is assumed as good links are organic link building which takes time and effort before it can get be more valuable. This kind of links is difficult to replicate. Hence, it will give you a more dominant position in your market. There are several types of links which are considered as good links, such as follow:

  • Editorial Links

One of the good examples of link is when somebody with good reputation in your field is inspired by you, your company, your products or your service. Thus, they take initiative to write an article about you and link to your website.

Many companies are struggling to get this review, but few can obtain these links. In fact, this type of links is pretty rare to get, but Google will value it extremely high.

  • Guest Blogging

Guest blogging may rank a little below the above examples; they are not be there just for a link but also provide value to their audience. However, you need to be more cautious as Google counts guest posting as a link building tactic. Especially, if you are going away beyond the expectations of value and be extremely conservative in terms of outbound links to your own website. Therefore, to achieve good rank, you need to write something with the intent of building you brand and reaching a larger audience.

  • Niche Directories

You may assume that directories will give you nothing, but highly focused niche directories still offer you a valuable source of links. Find many sources of directories focused on your niche, and their SEO value will vary dramatically, but it’s definitely worth looking into. A good directory should be such follow:
– Instead of accepting anyone who is willing to pay the fee, you need to have a vetting process
– Publish valuable content regularly which can be accessed and indexed by search engines
– Prune broken links regularly from members who no longer have an active website.

 

The Ugly Links
Ugly links are links that don’t produce any contribution to your rank. In the other words, they don’t have much impact on your ranking. All you have is just a waste of time, money, and energy. Therefore, you need to know several kinds of ugly links. Below are kind of ugly links that you should avoid:

  • Guest Posting at Scale

Experienced SEO engineers know that article directories is the hot new thing in SEO world. This program is able to submit your article to thousands of these websites at once. Besides, most of these programs are also able to “spin” or modify the content, causing a “unique” article for each submission.

  • Links From Non-Relevant Websites

Now, Google are smart enough at identifying the topic of a website. They only need to assign significant weight to links which are relevant. So, don’t waste your time to build link building if it isn’t relevant.\

  • Header, Footer, and Sidebar Links

There are certain areas that Google doesn’t give much weight. They include headers, footers, and sidebars. This makes sitewide links become a bad idea unless they are:
– Linking to a relevant sister publication that you own
– Identifying software that runs a website, as you see with most content management, blogging, and e-commerce systems
– Identifying who designed a website

The Bad Links
Bad links are links that will make your site’s rank bad.  If you have these kinds of links, you should disavow it as they absolutely cause penalty when you’re inevitably caught. Unfortunately, Google will remember your action as an attempt to unethically manipulate ranking. Below are examples of bad links that you need to avoid.

  • Paid Links

Buying links from website owner is a big No, as Google will catch buyer or seller of paid links. This is because it will be easier for Google to follow the breadcrumbs to identify the other buyers and sellers.

  • Comment or Forum Spam

Even though, it will be easier to spread links to forum and comment sections of blogs. But, in the other hand, it can destroy your brand by doing this for this is the same with spreading spammy links all over someone else’ website. Besides, you open the risk of a link-based penalty as many website owners are able to report you to Google.

  • General Directories

General directories are also one of the potential epitomes that Google will hate. This is because customers can pay them fee. This is because there are bigger risks that they will accept any website except those promoting porn, gambling, or violence. Therefore, it will provide you with lacks of any useful content as it isn’t relevant to your website.

Why Real Time Search Algorithm Updates May be Bad News

bad news

Have you ever wondered what updates will come after Panda, Penguin, and many others? Don’t you worry, recently Google has released real time search algorithm updates which mean no need for searching any name for any update anymore, but on the other side this real-time update will surely make the job of any SEO services will become harder. So, what kind of problem will arise due to this real time search algorithm updates?

  • Troubleshooting Algorithmic Penalties

There are two types of penalties done by Google, algorithmic penalties and manual actions. Algorithmic penalties are a lot more difficult to troubleshoot than manual actions since in manual action, Google informs you of the penalty via the Google Search Console, giving webmasters the ability to address the issues that are negatively impacting their sites. This works oppositely with algorithmic penalty since you will never know if there are any problem exists.

So, how can you know if your web gets any algorithmic penalty? Well, the easiest way to figure it out is to match a decrement in your traffic with the dates of known algorithm updates or you can also determine if there is any algorithmic penalty by seeing if a site ranks high in maps but poorly for organic of different phrases.

  • Lead to Misdiagnosis and Confusion

What makes it is difficult and confusing is the fact that Google’s crawlers don’t crawl pages at the same frequency. So even if you’re keeping a detailed a timeline of website changes or actions, you still have a big chance from getting affected by algorithm update since there could be many other issues with the server or website changes that you may not be aware of that cause it is difficult for not to misdiagnosis of penalties. In fact, some SEO companies who try to take some actions like disavow their files to make a better link building may do more harm than good.

  • Negative SEO

With real time updates, you will need more time and effort to analyze your link building, if your link building is healthy enough or not. If it is not, then it is time for you to remove them.

3 Web Design Trends in 2016 that You Should Be Careful About

web design

Like every trend, web design trend always comes and goes. Therefore, if you are web designer keeping up to date is the best solution to stay successful in this industry, so you can understand what is good and what is bad for your design. Below are 3 web design trends that you shouldn’t use in 2016, you can read this material to avoid you from any harmful mistake.

  1. Complex Typography

You may find that having more multiple typefaces is a good idea, while the fact is that sometimes using more than two multiple typefaces in your website will create a confusing and cluttered looking site, which reduces legibility and readability. However, at some point you still can use more than two typefaces in order to get a good effect.

In addition, another important point that you should remember related with fronts is about its spacing. A good spacing will work well for clarity. Below are some more tips related with typography that you can use:

  • Experiment with fonts. Aim for clean and clear presentation that also reflects the brand’s visual style.
  • Use fonts and typefaces that complement each other or are contrast enough to provide interesting color. In addition, you need to allow for psychological level when selecting the font/typeface as believe it or not certain color and certain type of typography will bring different emotions and feelings, for instance, a serif brings an air of formality, a sans-serif feels reliable and a script can be haughty.
  1. Put Everything Under a Hamburger Menu

In order to simplifying the navigation, designers keep hiding all of icon under a hamburger menu whether it is in desktop or in mobile devices. It is understandable that many designers will prefer to hide it under the hamburger menu just to make your site cleaner and sleeker. However, this also increases the risk of discoverability.

  1. Parallax Scrolling

Recently, parallax scrolling is one of the most favorable sites that allow the foreground and background content to scroll at different speeds which cause an illusion of depth. However, it is still debatable if it produces a good UX.

  • Bad for SEO

Since having parallax scrolling in your page will result in one page optimization, so search engines will only have a little way of content that can be crawled by the search engines. This is especially true as text tends to be embedded in graphics.

  • Can Reduce Performance

Moreover, due to its heavy use of graphics and JavaScript, the page will require longer time to load the image and this will cause more trouble for mobile users.

  • Can Affect Users Negatively

Some people may find that parallax site is more fun than the non-parallax sites, but some other people experience a motion sickness and significant usability issues toward parallax sites.